Cohesion in English - Halliday & Hasan (1976)

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M. A. K. Halliday and RL1qaiya Hasan AX INTRODUCTION 10 tNGLlS.H 10 TRANSFORI\·111 llONAL !.YN fA X

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Cohesion 1n English

M. A. K. HALLIDA Y Pr(lfessor of Lingt-tistrcs University ~f Essex ll-11>

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All l'ighrs r~scned , No pJn of lhtl grounds1r was not unreasonably held that relations. 'beyond the sentence' involved a complex interplay of lmgUJstics with other concerns such as rhcroric, aesthetics, and pragmatics, for wluch the theoretical foundations and framework were too shaky w supporr ambitious model bmlding. And that m my case lingmm had enough on hand to get their sentent!al home furnished . Meanwhile, literary crirics (for whom of course text structure has been a traditional concern) and social anthro pologists (for whom text and talc ~ramme m Litrgurstics a11d English Tcachr'ng at Untvcrstty College London. The at m of these studie~ was to provide an account of aspects of contemporary English which would be both founded on theory and also applicable m practtcc: a description of the system, but 011(' which, since it w aN based on evidence from texts of different varierics, Ulcluding both spoken and written, would be useful in application to further text studies. A relativdy neglected aspect of the lmguistic system is it~ resources for rext construction, the range of meanings that arc specifically associated With relarmg what is being said .or written to its semantic environment. The pnnClpal component o f these resources is that of cohes•on. Cohesive relatJons are relations between two or more elements in a text that are independent of the structure; for example betwt"en a personal pronoLm and an antecedent proper name, such as jolm . _. he. A semanric relauon of th1~ kind may be set up either wirhm a sentence or between sentences; with the consequence that, when it crosses a sentence boundary, 1t has the dfecr of making the two sentences cohere with one another. The various kinds of cohesion had been outlined b y M . A. K. HalltJay in his wntings on sryhstics, and the concept was developed by Ruqaiya Hasan tn her Umverstty of Edmburgh doctoral rhesis. The earlier chapters of this book w ere first published as CrarJIII1ttticnl Co11esio11 itJ Spoke11 m1d Written Et~glislr, Pnrt I, by Ruqaiya Ha)an, Commumcanon Research Centre (University College London) and Longman>. Green & Co, Programme ill Lmgrtistics m11i E11gltsh Te,Jcl1111g: Papers, No. 7, 1968. T his contained Cha.pters r, 2 and 3 in their ori gm). Meanings are realized (eoded) as forms, and forms are realized in turn (recoded) as expressions. To put this in ev~day terminology, meaning is put into wording. and wording into sound or writing: meaning

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~unding '/writing

(the semantic system) (the lexicogrammatical system, grammar

and vocabulary) (the phonological and orthographic

systems)

The popular term 'wording' refers to lexicogrammatical form, the choice of words and grammatical structures. Within this stratum, there is no hard-and-fast division between vocabulary and grammar; the guiding principle in language is that the more general meanings are expressed through the grammar, and the more specific meaning. did I I hurt your 11'1!EUNGS H4 A I I didn't I MEAN I to // the second sentence having the rising-falling tone 4· For an explanation of the intonation system, see section S-4 and the references cited there.

r .2 Cohesion and linguistic structure 1.2.1

Texture aru1 structure

A text, as we have said, is not a structural unit; and cohesion, in the sense in which we are using the term, is not a structural relation. Whatever relation there is among the parts of a text- the sentences~ or paragraphs. or turns in a dialogue- it is not the same as structure in the usual sense. the relation which links the parts of a sentence or a clause. StructUre is, of course, a unifying relation. The parts of a sentence or a clause obviously' cohere' with each other. by virtue ofthe structure. Hence they also display texture; the elements ofany structure hav~ by definition. an internal wllty which ensures that they all express part of a text. One

I.2 COHESION AND LINGUISTIC STRt.TCTUJtB

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cannot change text in mid-sentence, so to speak; or rather.. if one does, there will always: be a break in the structure. with something being interpolated which is not structurally a part of the same sentence~ as in Hamlet's

[1: 7] Then I will come to my mother by and bythey fool me to the top of my bent- I vvill come by and by. or, more conversationally, [I:8] •.. But what I want-to know is-yes. some ice,_ please- what this government think they're doing when they spend all that money on building new schools. What's wrong with the old ones? In general. any unit which is structured hangs together so as to form text.

All grammatical units - sentences, clauses, groups. words - are internally • cohesive • simply because they are structured. The same applies to the phonological units, the tone group, foot and syllable. Structure is one means of expressing texture. If every text consisted of only one sentence, we should not need to go beyond the category of structure to explain the internal cohesiveneu of a text: this could be explained simply as a function of its structure. But texts are usually not limited to one sentence; on the contrary, texts consisting of one sentence only are faidy rare. They do exist; there are public notices, proverbs, advertising slogans and the like, where one sentence by itself comprises. a complete text, for example [:r;g] a. No smoking. b. Wonden never cease! c. Read The Herald every day.

But most texts